Hacker News

> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.

Wow, yeah, you'd need to have morons at the top of the chain of command and subordinates afraid to speak out in order for something like that to happen. Nothing like the US government today at all.

It's been discussed for decades that the US would run out of precision munitions in any multi-week conflict. The presumption was that the US would either be in a nuclear war at that point, or a ground campaign would complete the task along with dumb munitions.

That the US decided to expend it's precision weapon stockpile on a conflict of choice with no ground or dumb bombing campaign to fallback on is a mystery for later generations. It is not unbelievable that Iran is capable of blocking a dumb bombing campaign indefinitely, or that the viable targets for such a campaign are politically untenable.

This doesn't account for the substantial difference between military deception and political (self-)deception.

The Midway water shortage deception was a way to gain a tactical, followed by strategic advantage.

Running out of missiles is an "incovenient truth" for the zionist pro-war crowd. History is littered with innumerable examples of political leaders not adequately considering ground-truth military and logistical realities (Confederates fighting in Pennsylvania, Germans invading Russia, etc.).

> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.

This is a concerning statement, as it implies it'd be impossible for the United States to lose an engagement regardless of any and all evidence.

Most dominant does not mean most intelligent

> nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one

I would argue that you are right with Ukraine vs Russia since the former has sunk so many of latter's assets. But that has not been the case with US vs Iran.

>For the most-dominant military power in the world

Russia kept saying its the second most powerful military in the world and now it's the second most powerful military in Ukraine. You can't just keep saying words and then think they're true because you keep repeating them.

There's no secret US weapons factories hidden away somewhere, the inadequacy of the US industrial base to maintain production for long term war have been known for decades and were in some sense even an intentional shift after the end of the Cold War.

Once proper defenses for cheap and slow suicide drones is created (fast small unmanned interceptors with bullets instead of missiles) this temporary drone threat phase of war will be mostly over. The ability to build $1000 drones in everybody's garage was an obvious but unhandled threat, surely it will be though.

The funniest thing I've seen with the Ukraine war (if it's not AI) is an old prop plane with it's canopy removed and the dude in the rear seat shooting down a drone with his automatic rifle. We're going to get Top Gun: RC Mini Edition in the next armed conflict and it's going to seem like a video game.

It will then become just another threat, and one that is managed well enough to no longer be a david v. goliath kind of weapon.

PrSM has been in production for only a short time, and ATACMS stocks were never high. Neither of these are the backbone of US long-range precision strike weapons. Article is misleading.

Two birds with one stone for benefit of Putin.

Likely son of Ayatollah wanted to get rid of his weak father and Putin wanted the US to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. So Putin asked Krasnov to get rid of Ayatollah and empty the stockpile of weapons.

Trump always delivers for Russia.

There are a great many costs built into the system that this analysis won’t get you: mandatory useless ingredients, arbitrary standards, and pervasive regulations.

I worked in aerospace and know a bit about this. Say you want to make a missile. Well, you better have the paperwork for literally every component to show that the metal used in all of it originates from a foundry in one of a tiny handful of countries.

The unknowns of defense spending is a feature and not a bug - for defense contractors

I think most of the cost is in R&D

If you were to count the margin of everything it would be 100%. At the end of the day everything is either a resource harvested from the earth or human labor.

Many defense contracts are cost plus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_pricing

If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.

The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

Hey look on the bright side - every time we cut CDC staff by 25% or kick a 100K people off SNAP, we can afford a few more weeks of missiles.

I imagine elements in the Taiwanese govt are pushing a massive drone network to turn the nation into a porcupine.

On the flip side, at least the press is not hammering the Epstein files and the lack of any prosecution for the crimes documented in those.

The USA will not really defend Taiwan anyway. Perhaps they may send some ships or airplanes but even that attempt at show of force will quickly collapse when Beijing increases pressure.

The only thing Beijing can not control is what Taiwan does and invading an island is always difficult. Also Taiwan needs a nuclear arsenal just as Israel has; Japan too, Canada and the EU as well. The days where the big countries abuse the smaller ones are over - we all can see this past the point of Putin starting his genocide against Ukraine. His next step of escalation will be mass mobilization; that's why his propaganda department already now calls the "special military operation" (which it never was) a war (which it always was from the get-go, but now he wants to send more of his slaves to die for him and his oligarch-bros).

LBH US hasn't been in position to defend 1st island chain in a while, US performance vs Iran just made that obvious.

The one thing we have learned in recent wars is highend hardware can shoot down subsonic munitions reliably, highend missiles can penetrate high end defense reliably. AKA PRC is uniquely positioned to blunt most of US fires (subsonic munitions) while having tons of highend fires vs US defense. But really PRC doesn't even need highend fires for TW scenario, see their subsonic cruse missile / drone gigafactory (like proper not ghetto tier) that can churn 1000s per day, i.e. even with pure subsonics PRC can fully saturate entire US posture/basing structure in 1IC/2IC.

US in westpac has been thoroughly functionally cooked for years. It just took Iran performance for sensible people to realize how cooked. Not just how not up to task i.e. force balance, but how US tech stack uniquely vulnerable to PRC, who TBF has spend past 10 years of modernization strictly on this issue. NVM PRC can now conventionally hit CONUS as recognized by recent Pentagon China Power report, something PLA watchers have known for years, meanwhile said report still assumes PRC highend missile stockpiles is about size of Irans which is kek territory if not delulu.

TLDR people should stop hopiuming about PRC and evaluate consequences of commodity precision fire for mid tier operators. What Iran can do today, most of Americans can do in 10-15 years, i.e. we are entering a world where CONUS is vulnerable due to tech again (remember US project almost extinguished to wooden British boats). CONUS isolation/security as much man made as god/geographic given. It relies on US expeditionary model containing everyone ability to project fires to their shores. Once that's done, entire US defense model post war breaks. All of which is to say, forget Iran, anticipate Monroe wars in the future.

If you look at Taiwan history when the US gave PRC the UN seat and Nixon visited Beijing it was pretty much decided.

Taiwan is no West Berlin and everyone knows it.

The health care issue in the USA isn't due to lack of funding, the US spends more on health care per person than any other country, double that of many European countries with single payer systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.

As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.

  > the reason

What are we even talking about here? Controlling the strait? This actually means controlling so much land around the strait that Iran can't launch missiles or drones at ships. Essentially conquering all of Iran by ground invasion. The USA could do this, sure, but we don't want to because its too stupid even for us.

I mean, we could, the issue is that it would be politically untenable. Controlling the straight means controlling Iranian territory, which means a ground invasion and occupation, which means ~2 million deployed personnel until you set up a compliant regime (because Iran, is absolutely massive). Which is why literally every other president has chosen to negotiate with them or keep them at arms length.

Soft power would have gone a long way towards furthering US interests in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it seems too late for that. By the time a new administration's diplomacy reverts the current antagonism and lack of trust, the dollar will have lost ground as the default reserve currency and financing US debt will become much more expensive than it is now, making military expenses prohibitive, but still a priority.

This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.

I think it's worth pointing out that the US almost certainly could have taken control of the strait. But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.

You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).

1. It's not the reason for any of those things

2. Running out of munitions is bad but it's the least bad possible problem. We know how to solve it, just pay for higher volume munition purchases. There's no suggestion the missiles don't work well. They actually are quite effective! We just spent the minimum on expendable purchases and bought new carrier groups instead.

Restocking at much much much higher volume than we just spent will cost $50-100 billion, which is not cheap, but is not THAT expensive compared to any other government program (it's like... 2% of our COVID spending). And it's actual effective reindustrialization unlike other uses of the money.

Doctrine never intended for these bombs to be used almost exclusively as means to wage wars. These are meant for strikes that need to be precise and carried in a short notice.

If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.

Air superiority was established fairly early on in the conflict. Flying F-15 and F-16s now. Not even stealth and they drop more than just missles - they carry bombs. B-52s weren’t sent in to carpet bomb the area of that’s what you mean.

US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.

You can't really stockpile missiles, their explosives and fuel needs to be replaced with some interval, so having a massive stockpile doesn't make that much sense, because it's as you suggests expensive to maintain.

In the case of an war (like you know, a war-war) the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers (but it won't be cheap). I would however like to see what Ukraine does, if they get the go-ahead to start making Patriot missiles. They probably won't just do a run of 50 or 100 missiles and call it a day.

You have the same issue with the conventional bombs and their guidance kits, which when delivered in contested areas are not usually cheaper.

The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.

> That's the one glaring weakness of relying too heavily on missiles. They are expensive and difficult to manufacture. And they have a limited shelf life, making stockpiles also expensive

I don't think so. This observation completely misses the root cause, and it ain't missiles.

Armed forces size their stockpiles in terms of their short term needs focused on rapid reaction and deterrence. The goal is to be able to react to immediate threats and then shift the economy to a war economy to supply the effort in economically efficient ways.

What failed this time is that the trump administration was hoping to attack Iran without having to declare war, effectively starting a war without preparing for the war.

The results are obvious: the peace time stockpile was depleted at a time where the country was not prepared to replenish it. Trump shifter the us armed forces to deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies.

And so they ran out of ammo.

There are further compounding factors such as a lack of plan and lack of exit strategy. But placing your military in a state where they spend their ammo without any plan to ressuply it... You will have the same problem if you replace hellfire missiles with sticks and stones.

It wouldn’t be the first war the USA loose against a smaller enemy. See Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc etc.

I think that's an unfair assessment. Depleting a stockpile of a particular munition (since missile strikes are less unpopular than a full-scale deployment) because of overreliance shows a particular strain, not a pervasive weakness.

yesn't in case of Russia a lot of their military just "didn't work properly"/"was ineffective in a very fundamental way"

this wasn't the case for the US, their military did work and was effective in context of the specific think they where used for. It's just that the thing they where used for isn't effective in winning the kind of conflict the US did start.

while this is "just" the "non effective" part being some where else it is a very fundamental difference in the end

like to put it this way,

if weapons of mass destruction like nukes, bio weapons etc. would magically disappear an invasion and takeover of (part of mainland) Russia would be relatively viable (mainly by China, but others might want a slice, too).

on the other hand even without weapons of mass destruction trying to invade the mainland US still seems futile/to be a losing battle, no matter who tries it.

No, the opposite has happened with this war. Adversaries globally have seen the ability of the US and Israel to operate with near-impunity over Iran, and it has destroyed confidence in non-Western defence systems.

The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.

Apple and oranges comparison.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is a war of invasion.

The US-Iranian is more of an air superiority campaign.

If you want any take away lesson: don't attack countries that care about defending themselves. Not everyone is Iraq.

And don't underestimate the efficiency of asymmetric warfare.

It depends on the specific nature of the conflict. Not every conflict is about control over land; Iran is a perfect example. Their missiles provide a credible threat against globally critical infrastructure, which gives them a way to retaliate without committing ground troops. And their drone strikes are using heavier one-way drones, not FPVs, which wouldn’t make a dent in oil infrastructure or tanker ships.

The current US force configuration was designed to fight quick wars against opponents who mostly can’t fight back. It’s a military built to play “global police,” and for a short while this was probably the correct configuration.

Building a military that stands ready to fight any kind of war is probably impossible—it would be too expensive. You need to look at the biggest threats and optimize for those conflicts. The problem that the US now faces is that rival nations have optimized for defense against its particular style of maneuver warfare with heavy air bombardment. Air defense (not missile defense) is better and cheaper than ever.

Sure. I bet the Military Times also used the IRCG as a source. https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/08/04/...

Probably Reuters too https://www.reuters.com/world/us-has-used-virtually-all-its-...

Instead you should trust this unsourced HackerNews comment!

Where is your 5% used quote from?

All the estimates for interceptors like patriots I've seen are north of 50% used so 5% certainly seems like an outlier

Their source is Reuters and is literally the sub-headline. You did not read this article. Flagged.

" source was probably the IRCG"

Curious. What is your source on the 5%? Why is random chud on the internet a 'better' source.

> but even with those we only went through about 5% of the stockpile.

Source? In terms of VLS-packed high end interceptors, I'd imagine they're much deeper into the magazine than that. Quad-packed point defense missiles might be lower, but those aren't useful against theater ballistic missiles like Iran has been deploying.

> Their source was probably the IRCG...

That doesn't make much sense as disinformation. Iran stands to gain very little by lying like that, and judging by the exodus of US generals and admirals I'd wager to say that this was an internal point of disagreement in the US armed forces. A lot of assets earmarked for the Pacific theater have been expended with no quick replacements incoming.

War is one of the most high tech and technologically interesting things humans do, and is often the first place that truly state of the art abilities are showcased.

It's not hard for me to understand why techies would be so interested.

It’s easier to believe when missiles are the only strategy being used in the war…

Never underestimate how much damage a single high-ranked idiot can inflict on its own ranks.

It's easy to believe, it's hard to realize.

The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.

The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.

These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).

It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.

It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.

The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.

That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.

never underestimate the monetary inefficiency of the military industrial complex

Paper tiger.

Missiles (BIG EXPLOSION) look better when presented in video briefings to Trump and as propaganda on Fox news. It's all optics and style. No other goals.

America could theretically sustain other cheaper losses, like a few more F15s going down - but Trump is rightfully terrified of the political fallout of American pilots being capturred and torture videos showing up on Telegram.

That would be true if the money spent was actually optimized on output rather than expensive contractors, consultants, and third party profits. :(

"Minor" conflict? You really don't realize how much ressources Hesgeth has committed to this, and how much your president likes to make things go "boom".

See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).

This should be higher, the Army never had a lot of ATACMs to begin with as launching missiles at things is not really their job.

Doesn't make the points about this administration not having a real plan invalid though...

What are you talking about? The war is over. It's more over than any war in history. In fact, the POTUS has already ended the war 38 times. /s

Okay, let's start.

- A country, even as big as the US, is strictly, evidently, not exceptional.

- The US lost the majority of the wars it joined/started in the last 100 years and came home every time trying to sell it as a victory despite not achieving their war goals.

- You may have weapons or power of some kind, but every move you make costs you some kind of currency: time, material, energy, credibility, goodwill. You may have large amounts, but they're never infinite.

- Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal: change and control are "constructive" concepts, while bombs can only offer you guaranteed chaos. You MIGHT be able to steer that chaos afterwards, but it's not guaranteed and numbers do not simply improve your position here. (see: Iraq, etc.)

> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1953

That fools running a country who turfed out military experience for loyalty were completely blind to what they were doing? I had no idea that running out of missiles was a distinct possibility until Spencer Ackerman started beating that drum in his newsletter around the start of the conflict. Forever Wars (along with the pieces he links to) has been an eye opening read.

US adversary countries have to love everything that is happening. If you’re China you win by doing nothing, just let the US administration pillage the country

It bodes well for Europeans when the Americans begin their invasion of Denmark, at the very least. Not great for a potential Russia-USA war and Taiwan wouldn't get as much support if the Chinese invade would also be difficult, though.

The title says "virtually all" but the first paragraph says "much". The actual stockpile is probably larger than this news report would make it seem. It would be convenient for Trump and his Russia-loving cronies if it would appear that the USA has no more weapons to support Ukraine with, of course.

Many advanced NATO weapons being difficult to produce and only being available in small quantities is something that has been discussed before, I don't think that's news. The rate at which they're being spammed without much result at Iran is, but that's hardly surprising given the current people in charge.

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes", international relations edition.

America is not happy when it is not at war. There has to be an enemy. The old WOT had finally run out of steam; people are coming out of college who were born after 9/11. Venezuela (and Latin America generally) made a good enemy for a while, but they were too easily defeated. But Iran? America has wanted a rematch since Jimmy Carter.

(A bipartisan problem, mostly, but propped up by pro-war media. The only people against it are a few Democrats, almost all of whom are women)

Time to send in the ground troops. Nothing bad can happen. /s

One begins by looking at the sources which the article dies not substantiate.

This nation is sitting ducks? The only reason we don't have Red Dawn is nobody wants this nation idiots.

If you watch CSPAN/etc it has been verified during congressional questioning of the current head of the dept. of defense.

It also says they declined to say how many the US has left. And saying “person familiar with the matter” is doing a lot of work. It could be anyone with no direct information. This is what laundering a bogus story looks like.

I don’t think the title is inaccurate and robbing Peter to pay Paul isn’t the military flex Pete Hesgeth may think it is. Anyone who has ever slept under a too-small comforter knows how this will go.

The missles Russia is launching are made within the last few months. What stockpile they do have is being built up for (another) winter campaign

Its all drones and one F-15, its not like dozens of F-22s or F-35 are being shot out of the sky

Which expensive planes are falling out of the sky?

yeah, let's start all to produce more weapons. What could possible go wrong. What about this? The USA just go home, nobody is going to invade them.

The strategy was to get Epstein off of everyone’s mind. And if it cost over $40billion and counting then it was deemed worth it, because the president comes first, that how’s our president thinks, me first, and our politicians, party first, our lobby second and the oligarchs third.

> American-Israeli conflict against Iran

Is it even a correct framing for the conflict ? Iran seems to have big issues with UAE and Saudi Arabia and repeatedly fired at them and got fired by them.

Think Ukraine is the reason the US is low on missiles? Do the numbers actually support that? The numbers don’t seem to support that. From a very cursory search, offensive missiles seem to be around 2:1 Iran. And that’s just raw numbers; someone other than me who might do a little moral editorializing would point out the use in Ukraine was to fight off an illegal invasion while the most effective strike in Iran killed a hundred schoolgirls.

Ukraine will take advantage of low PrSM stock ... how?

Didn't Americans kill something like 150 Iranian school girls and basically nothing came of it?